I think the one thing you hit on is that your family valued education. They knew that in order for you to have a better life than the one they had, the one tool they could give you to be successful in life is education. They worked hard to give you this by making sure you had your basic needs met so that you could focus on learning.
I seem to recall from reading a GitHub issue that a public cert and private key is generated for your user account upon creation. Once you start federating and interacting with other instances, the cert is distributed. When you delete the instance and start all over from scratch with the same username, now there’s a different public cert and the remote instances no longer trust your username.
I’ll try to find the GitHub issue that discusses this issue.